Falling (11 page)

I wait up for Tarren, but he locks himself in his lab until
midnight and then goes straight to his room. No matter. I finish my letter to
Dr. Lamsin. This is redemption. Or another way to pick at scabs.

Now that I have a perfectly good computer to write with, I
have realized that writing is most definitely out of the question. I don’t have
any use for an outlet. Things should not come out. Things should be bound in
strait jackets and chains and locked in coffins and encased in cement. Things
are the snot bubbles. Vein-covered bulbs rising up out of my hands. Dead
puppies. Dead Ryan. Karen with her medicine bag. Lots of cement.

So I apologize instead, and I use my safe little notebook.
Small apologies first. Tonight I apologize to Dr. Lamsin, my Shakespeare II
professor, for missing her class. For any awkwardness my disappearance may have
caused her and my classmates. I sincerely hope that the ongoing search for my
body is not cause for continual distraction.

My pen falters. The last lines of the letter wait for
closure. I spent some time on the roof yesterday reading Hamlet, and when I
close my eyes, the words are there, all of them, suspended in the ether of my
mind. I quickly peruse the iambic pentameters, pluck a random flower, and
scribble it in, though I suspect it hardly makes any sense at all.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain
below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I feel slightly better, maybe even a little noble for all
the suffering I have endured. Not submitting like Katherina. Not cracking wide
open like Ophelia. Not giving up like Juliette. Not yet.

I close the notebook and trace the intricate swirls on the
front.  It is a quality journal, black with electric blue lines twisting around
the front and back cover. It has a real spine and thick vanilla paper. I was
surprised to pull it out of the bag of clothes and toiletries that Tarren
picked up for me. I didn’t ask him to buy it.

* * *

The next morning I am ready. I crouch on the roof, letting
the rising sun wake my skin. The door opens below, and Tarren takes a deep
breath of the fresh air.

With a polite cough to gain his attention, I exaggerate my
leap for effect, throwing myself backwards off the roof. With a graceful twist,
I land softly in front of Tarren. If he is impressed with my mad skills, he
fails to show it. I pretend I wasn’t at all expecting a compliment. I try to
match his detached air, pushing back my shoulders and setting my face into a
disaffected expression with a hint of grimace.

“I want to run with you,” I say.

Tarren frowns. I frown back. We frown at each other. I had meant
to apologize. I had meant to say “hello.”

Tarren takes off without a word, and I follow, keeping at
his shoulder. We move through the woods, skipping over roots and shuttling up
and down embankments. Tarren increases his speed, but I stay with him. We run
in silence for an hour as the sun warms the air around us. I’m sure we should
have turned back already, but Tarren keeps pushing forward. I realize that he’s
testing me.

All I wanted was to see about breaking this tense reserve
between us, but he’s turned my gesture of reconciliation into a competition. I
keep my face placid, but my anger flares. It’s amazing how easily Tarren can
reach inside me and stir up the dark places until the memories, like
butterflies, take wing and flutter in front of my eyes.

The gun held steady, aimed at my head.
Tarren’s gun. Blood all over him. His cold eyes locking onto mine in the
mirror. His humorless mouth. Glowering face. The stupid nice things he does
that almost make me feel sorry for him.

But I don’t.

If Tarren wants a competition, then he’ll get it. One glance
at his energy field, and I know that I can beat him. Sweat runs down his face,
and his heart is thudding hard. The heavy sun propels me even as it weakens
him.

Miles slips beneath our shoes, and Tarren stubbornly keeps
up the pace. I stay at his shoulder. The trees trap the heat and turn it swampy
around us. My body is wet, and the things inside of it — lungs, hamstrings,
calves — ache with deepening timbres. But I’m going to win, and it won’t be
long now.

We’ve been running hard for hours. Tarren’s steps are
swaying. His energy is faded to a thin foggy glow that hugs close to his body
and spikes with red and wild yellow jags.

I want him to fail, and I sing it to him in my head.
Fail, fail, fail. Fail on the trail. Fall on a nail.
Darkness
stirred up and tasting sweet. I am giddy with the idea of watching him crumple
from heat exhaustion. He needs to be humbled. Except he’s already been humbled.
Broken to this and me trying to crush the pieces smaller. Just as fast as it
comes, the anger empties from my mind. I surprise myself — I slow down.

“Tarren,” I call, “I can’t…can’t run anymore.”

“You sure?” he tries not to wheeze. His cheeks are flushed
deep red, and his hair goes black when it’s soaked like this. He still insists
on long sleeves and pants even though I know.

“Yeah, I’m about to drop. You can keep going though.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “You don’t know the way back.”

His heart rate is still fluttering hard, so I beg to walk.
We amble through the woods. There are so many questions flitting through my
mind all twisted and warped with the heat and my weeping muscles and the song
with its claws out.

“What was she like?” I hear myself ask. “Diana.”

Tarren looks at me with guarded eyes. “My mother?”

“Our mother.” I keep the hurt out of my voice. It may have
been an accident.

Tarren takes his time with the answer. Musing isn’t the
right word. It’s too casual. Processing is better. He must have an entire
company inside of his head measuring, chiseling, having committee hearings on
possible answers and testing their structural integrity before releasing a
finished product into the world.

“Tired,” he says.

“What?”

“I remember…she always seemed tired.”

“Wait,” I can’t keep the disappointment out of my voice, “I
thought she was, like, Amazon Mom. Intelligent, courageous. Gabe says she was
incredible.”

Tarren tilts his head in a very un-Tarren-like way. His face
is thoughtful.

“Of course she was. It takes a lot of energy to be
incredible.”

“Oh.” This is when I realize that there is a Tarren
underneath the mean, angry Tarren I know. Not exactly a good Tarren, but a real
Tarren; someone who looks like he may just smile for real.

Two weeks pass, and something like a routine begins to
develop until Gabe finds an angel and we go after it.

* * *

Tarren and I run each morning, silent, focused, racing the
sun as it lumbers up over the horizon. I follow the rhythmic rise and fall of
Tarren’s shoulder, and these are the scarce moments when my mind empties, and
the song is hollow and distant. We come home to bluegrass strumming out of
Gabe’s computer speakers as he studies death and finds small flowers of humor
in that seemingly barren field. He gives us the “obit of the day,” and I
pretend it’s not creepy, and that there isn’t something sinister, staked gauzy
and invisible like spider webs around our lives.

In the afternoon the boys go into town to fight and return
home with new bruises and little jags of red in their auras. They spend the
long, hot noon hours shooting empty soup cans in the backyard or grunting with
weights in the basement. In the evening, Gabe replaces bluegrass twang with
punky alternative beats as he fiddles with web code, plays online poker and
chats with friends who will never know his real name. Tarren finds chores to do
over at Dr. Lee’s house or riddles me with questions in his lab.

Tarren’s lab. I expect needles, jumbo computers, brain wave
readers, beakers foaming with purple liquid.  Instead, I find a small and tidy
room filled with books, a locked filing cabinet, a small fridge and a single
microscope on a desk.  I notice the faint outline of shapes on the walls
beneath layers of white paint and remember Gabe telling me that this had been
Tammy’s bedroom.

There are no crazy experiments, no dashes of lightning and
high, cackling laughs. No trace of any vial holding a magic, glowing cure.
Instead, it’s just Tarren with a never ending list of mundane questions
breaking me into bits and pieces. I lie more than I should. A recorder sits on
the desk next to me drinking up my hedges and nervous stutters and long
silences when I don’t know how to answer or evade.

I don’t tell Tarren about the colors in the auras. Or the
song. When Tarren asks again and again about how Grand changed me, I emphasize
the one needle part or spin around on the stool, because this always makes him
frown.

It is almost a relief when Tarren asks me to do pushups or
pull ups, to jump, to run a loop through the woods as fast as I can or to lift
ever-increasing amounts of weight. I never press to my full limit. Some
deeply-embedded fear doesn’t want me to reveal my true strength to Tarren, or
perhaps to myself. It terrifies me how my muscles can unleash a tide of
pushups, how I can bench press two hundred pounds, two fifty, three hundred,
before I stop because this is so, so, so wrong. I can’t decipher the dark,
muddy colors that climb into Tarren’s aura while he watches and records my
numbers.

I learn that the key to extricating myself from Tarren’s
questions and his tests is to start asking him questions of my own.

What did our mother’s voice sound like?
When did Diana tell her children about angels? When did she start training
them? When did they begin to kill? Do other people fight angels? Do the Fox
brothers have aunts and uncles and grandparents?

Soon enough Tarren will put storm clouds on his face and
duck behind them.

“We’re done,” he says, and I’m free to go hang out with
Gabe, read a book on the roof, imagine new Grand-killing scenarios or write
more apologies to the people from my old life.

At night Gabe is in the mood for rock and cranks it loud as
he pulls up different map views on each computer screen and searches for
patterns among the dead. If he doesn’t find anything, we watch cheesy action
flicks or he’ll goad me into playing video games. He always fries me with
fireballs, skewers me with a samurai sword or pummels me into pulp, but I’m
getting good quick.

I ask him the same questions that put storm clouds on
Tarren’s face, and Gabe takes some delight in answering each one with a
blatant, long-winded lie that closely resembles a plot from Star Wars, Indiana
Jones or one of the National Lampoon Vacation movies.

* * *

On a particular night when I’m in one of my moods where I
can’t really handle anything, I crawl up onto the roof and think about Diana.
When I close my eyes, I can see her face perfectly, the way it was in the beach
photograph on the bookshelf in my bedroom.

She was beautiful and strong – a modern day Amazon – but I
think she was a terrible mother to raise her children as soldiers. To press
guns into their hands and deny them a chance to know anything different. What
kind of love is that? Was she so obsessed with revenge that she would sacrifice
anything?

The question echoes in my mind then turns its fangs on me.
How far would you go to kill Grand?

I know better than to answer. I try to rein myself in, but
the darkness is awake and churning.

Diana…Mom, when you gave me away, were
you protecting me or glad to be rid of me?
I stare up at the stars,
imaging her blue-gray eyes hidden somewhere beneath their bright points.

Why did you even carry me to term?

Gabe rescues me from my thoughts. He clamors loudly onto the
roof, stretches out on his back next to me and lets out a big sigh. I’m sitting
up, legs crossed, and I automatically tuck my hands protectively into the
sleeves of my too-big jacket.

We both look up at the stars and don’t say anything for a
while.
Perhaps they catch the secrets of our hearts and
hold them for us until we are brave enough to give them voice.  Pixie Girl is
stupid girl
.

The night is filled with cricket harmonies and the slow dip
of fireflies below. I take a breath, smelling the scent of pine needles,
hearing the animal songs lifting out from the trees around us. It still seems
so strange not to hear an undercurrent of traffic, the many different voices of
strangers going about their lives in close approximation to yours, to breathe
and not catch hints of barbeque or fast food or car exhaust. There is such a
loneliness in this—remembering what I alone have lost.

Colorado loses its heat at night, but Gabe, as always, seems
comfortable in just his t-shirt. For good measure, he kicks off his shoes. One
of them picks up speed and goes tumbling down the slope of the roof.

I am up, leaping like a dancer, hooking a finger through the
laces and catching the shoe just before it plunges into the night. I bring the
renegade footwear back to Gabe.

“Show off,” he drawls. The smile doesn’t linger on his face,
and I notice new, darker shades pulsing in his aura. For no discernable reason,
Gabe begins answering the questions I’d given up on asking.

He tells me that Diana started training her children young
in self-defense. She taught them how to run away if the angels ever came, how
to hide. Always know the exits. Look at everyone’s hands, but don’t let them
know that you’re looking. Stay calm. Always stay calm.

Gabe doesn’t realize how well I can see his face in the
darkness, because as he speaks, the careful indifference slides away, and all
that’s left is the lost puppy look, lots of lines, and the smiles fled far
away.

“We had a choice,” Gabe insists though I did not challenge
him. “Mom never pressured us to fight. Tried to talk us out of it, actually.
But I wanted to fight. So did Tammy. We wanted to save people. Be heroes. Mom
said heroes were idiots who whittled away their lives for a world that couldn’t
be saved. She said it was lonely, bitter, exhausting. Constant sacrifice. I
thought it all sounded awesome. Tarren was the smart one. He said ‘no.’ Sometimes
I think the only reason he ever started looking for a cure was so that he could
end all this and have his family back.”

“Of course, that was before,” Gabe adds.

I simply cannot abide the wretched look on Gabe’s face, so I
take a deep breath and say, “I didn’t go to my prom either. No one asked me
junior or senior year. I bought a dress though, just in case. It’s still
hanging in my closet at home. Well, if my parents didn’t clean it out.”

Gabe turns his head in my direction.

“The police called off the search for me yesterday,” I tell
him. “Did you know that?”

“Yeah.”

After a while he says, “I didn’t know about you for a long
time. Mom only told me the week before she died. Not sure why. Maybe she wanted
to confess. Lay her burdens down before the end. Afterwards, I would wonder
about you sometimes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, what you looked like. If you had any funny quirks.
What kind of life you led. If you were happy.  I kind of imagined you with more
freckles for some reason. And sometimes if things got real bad — the first time
was when we had to drown this guy. Me and Tarren and Tammy all holding him
under, this angel, in his own pool — I would think of you out there in the
world and how we were making it a little safer for you, maybe a little better.”
Gabe’s voice is soft and shy, and he’s gone back to noticing the stars. “I know
that sounds lame, but it helped.”

“And how did I turn out? Anything like you imagined?”

“Angelic,” Gabe says with a grin, and then when I don’t
respond, “or was that stupid?”

“Kind of a sore point.” Now I’m looking up at the stars,
counting them rapidly in my head because I can now.

“Well, then not angelic at all. You’re a low down, ig’nant,
scumbag human like the rest of us.”

“Thanks Gabe.”

“Anytime Sis,” he replies, and the word jars me out of my
count. It takes me a moment to recover, but when I do, I am bold enough to say,
“Tell me what’s wrong.”

Gabe is quiet for a while. I follow his gaze up to the
stars, trying to see what’s painting yellow hues into his aura.

“Mom was right,” Gabe says, “this isn’t a good life.” His
voice is low and sad and those lines are back, digging in around his mouth.

“Gabe, just tell me.”

He sits up, still won’t look at me. “I found something.”

“Grand? Is it Grand?”

“Nah, Grand would never be stupid enough to show up in my
search algorithms. No, there’s been a few deaths out in Arizona, California and
Mexico. Looks like an angel. I haven’t told Tarren yet. He’ll have us out the
door and on the road in ten minutes.” Gabe pauses, swallows. “He won’t want to
leave you alone in the house.”

“Good, because I’m coming. I’ll need a gun,” I say.

Gabe grimaces. “Maya, I don’t want this life for you,” he
says as if he honestly doesn’t realize that revenge is the only reason I have
left to exist.

“It’s not your choice anymore Gabe. I want to fight.”

The cloak of night is all around us — the animal melodies,
the hunger drawing my eyes to Gabe’s energy. I am aware of every little flick
of movement, the red blush of his pain growing brighter within the flowing
blues.

“Please Maya,” Gabe whispers, “sit this first one out. Make
sure it’s what you really want.”

“I know what—”

“Just this one time, for me. I know I don’t have any right
to ask, but…” he trails off and finally his eyes come up to meet mine. Dark
wells of pain. It’s crazy how much I care about Gabe after only two weeks, how
deep that soft little tremble in his voice cuts.

“Alright, just this time,” I say, “but I won’t change my
mind.”

The smile is slow to come to his face, but when it lands, it
stretches wide.